E3 is but two weeks away. That was quick. It seems like only this time last year we were posting a series of predictions articles for the show's main press conferences. And yet here we find ourselves again, with the first of a new batch we'll be running all week.

First up, it's Sony. The House of PlayStation is arguably in the strongest position of all of the big three, having enjoyed nigh consistently strong sales and community favour since the PS4's launch. But with the big games slowing down a little since Bloodborne, and The Order: 1886 having been more than a bit guff, what is it going to pull out of the bag to reignite momentum at this year's press conference? Well we reckon the following...

Oh Red Dead. Long have you been praised as the most intelligent, most unique, and most rousingly poignant game ever crafted by the good folks who brought us Manhunt. Long have you been said stable’s most inconvenient-to-actually-play game. PC version? Ha! Nope, no outing for Rockstar’s most visually splendid game there, on the platform able to render those picturesque desertscapes in the most ludicrous detail. Unless you’re still rocking ten-year-old hardware, one of gaming’s standout masterpieces is just Not For You. Surely it’s time to change that?

Rockstar has done a marvelous job with all-stops-pulled PC port of GTA5, so is it really so implausible that it should be considering a similarly bang-up job for Red Dead, alongside a version for a console famously announced as being basically a PC in a small box? No, no it is not. Expect a download-only release, with at least six-months exclusivity.

In an earnest effort to explore other kinds of deadly zones – dangerous areas, even – Guerrilla will break out of its grim-and-grey corridors to explore a new, vibrant planet. It’s likely the game codenamed ‘Horizon’, which surfaced via leaked artwork (see above) back in September 2014.

It’s all about robot dinosaurs, and burly men with bear-skin hats brandishing massive guns... and it looks remarkably like Destiny, at least on a visual level. Chances of it being a gorgeous, yet vaguely disappointing first-person shooter with terrible level-design? High.

With Sony promising that the Project Morpheus VR headset will launch during the first half of 2016, now's the time to start drumming up hype for all the gaming possibilities. One simple way to do that would be recreating a virtual space using existing assets from a current AAA title - say, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or Batman: Arkham Knight, perhaps - and demoing what it would be like to walk through the game world in sensory-encompassing first-person.

We also wouldn't be surprised if London Heist, with its double-Move-controller gunplay and immersive interrogation scenes, gets expanded from a demo into one of the first at launch.

As much as these E3 conferences are an opportunity for major publishers to trumpet successes and exciting new releases, it's also a chance for a public mea culpa, much like when Sony owned up to its 2011 network outage. It's here that Sony will finally apologize for the lack of the originally promised PS Plus version of Driveclub.

The retail game is largely fixed (and ", so E3's a good a time as any to re-introduce it and announce an official release date.

Sony just isn't too keen on ever explaining what those reasons are, and this E3 will be no exception. We'll get the standard platitudes ("We still stand behind Vita blah blah") and a couple of hand-me-down indies from PS3 and PS4.

Any further mention of it will either be entirely by accident, in a sizzle reel (featuring the song 'Shut Up and Let Me Go' by the Ting Tings), or to let yet another Vita exclusive actually have a chance at decent sales by making the leap to PS4.

Sony has to understand that The Last Guardian is now more successful as a punchline than it is as an actual game. For years Sony Japan's magnum opus has been a no-show. Genuine hope for it being a real thing is now about as plentiful as rocking horse poop.

Something has to be done about that. If there's not even a mention of it at this year's E3, we’re writing off the last six years as a wash, erasing its very (non)existence from our memories. Give us something either way, Sony. We need to celebrate, or we need to move on.

Sony doesn’t have a whole lot of games for 2015. So it needs to get the biggest third-party titles to cosy up with PS4 and spoon it gently in the night. Enter Star Wars: Battlefront, which will make more money this year than an entire room full of FIFA employees during World Cup selection week.

Sony will throw around phrases like “only on PlayStation” and “first on PS4” to refer to a week’s exclusivity on the third piece of Battlefront DLC, and an unlockable ‘light-brown’ Ewok skin-hat for your character. Oh, and the Beta will probably be exclusive to PS4. But it’s all about the Ewok hat.

‘HD’ updates of older games aren’t going away. We thought they were. We thought they were a blip. We thought they were just a quick and easy stopgap to plug the lacklustre gaming schedule at the start of this new generation. But no. It seems that they’re just a ‘thing’ now, like lensflare, or DLC, or dogs, or sandwiches. Capcom has even officially acknowledged the churning out of past glories as a major part of its future business plan. Yay! Woo! No, we’re not thrilled either.

But yeah, there’s totally going to be an Uncharted Trilogy collection, to fill the gap until the delayed Uncharted 4 makes a mockery of its title. We already know God of War 3 is going PS4, and we strongly suspect another big PS3 title will make the leap (well, it’s quite a small hop, actually) to new-gen.

Sony’s slick showreel of independent games will once again remind us of the power of the montage... and the need to get on with it during really long press conferences. The rapid presentation of clever little games bound for PlayStation may be shallow, but it will cement the indie game as a valuable commodity in making any console’s lineup surprising and diverse.

The soundtrack will obviously be something as hip, upbeat, and annoyingly catchy as ‘The Nights’ by Avicii. The montage will also cut in footage of attractive 20-somethings with perfect white teeth and obsessively-clipped facial-hair, clutching DualShocks while laughing maniacally and stroking each other’s arms.

The House of Wolves update is just out (and brilliant). There is buzz around the game is once more akin to that of a thousand bees. And there have been leaks, oh so many leaks, of information regarding Bungie’s next expansion, the really big one, codenamed Comet. And it's releasing in September, so it has to be time for a proper showing.

Although a multiformat game, Destiny’s public image is synonymous with Sony, the two having been tied up since launch by way of branded ads and exclusive strikes and multiplayer maps. If Bungie is going to show off Comet at E3 (or The Taken King, as it will be called), it will do it at Sony’s conference. And you can expect a higher, but proportionally similar, number of extra things for PlayStation players this time around. A couple of extra strikes, three new multiplayer maps, and maybe an upgrade to the Prison of Elders. Yeah, that sounds about right.

At least one lunatic online will proclaim Severed to be ‘the game to save Vita’. It isn’t.

We know that will be out by March 31, 2016 at the latest, having been delayed out of 2015. So to make good on the extra waiting time, Naughty Dog will deliver a dazzling gameplay run-through, including archaeological hijinks, shootouts with armed goons, grappling-hook-enabled jumps, and more foreboding voiceovers from Sully.

It'll all end with another ominous line delivered by Troy Baker as Nathan's older brother (whose name will finally be revealed), then a fade to the confirmed release date for early next year.

No Man’s Sky is almost definitely going to be great. And after stealing E3 last year with that demo, before bundling E3 into the back of an unmarked van and taking it off to central Europe to be broken down and sold off, it is going to be Big News at Sony’s 2015 press conference.

But despite the dynamically generated, space-based explore-’em-up’s profile, a chunky proportion of the public are still a bit confused over what it actually is. Thus, expect a more guided, in-depth walkthrough on-stage, detailing on-planet gameplay, and probably a closer look at space combat too.

Last December, Final Fantasy series producer Shinji Hashimoto took the stage at the PlayStation Experience to announce the arrival of Final Fantasy 7 on the PS4… as a port of the PC version. Expert trolling aside, the port was slated to launch this spring. Spring is almost over, so what better way to announce the actual release date than at Sony's E3 conference?

And what if that release date was, oh, we don't know, immediately following the show? There's precedent: in , Sony announced the arrival of the PSOne version of the RPG classic during its E3 press conference and released it that same day.

Look, Sony doesn't need to do much with PS4’s actual hardware or software. While Xbox One remains a hideous console pariah, and Wii U an expensive child’s rattle, there’s no urgency for Sony to up its game with a price cut or hardware revision. Having said that, maybe we’ll see a 1TB PS4 announced at the show.

People will buy it because a) PS4 game installs are insanely large, and b) we need somewhere to store all those screenshots of us posing dramatically in Bloodborne, or dancing like a merry fool in-front of the Cryptarch in Destiny (as he gazes into the middle distance with a look of utter contempt on his stupid face).

Robots are pretty handy, eh? Capable of lifting the things we really don't want to and making all sorts of things with their ever-expanding digital brain smarts. Though if videogames teach us anything, it's never to trust Artificial Intelligence. Sure, they may try to win us over with their high efficiency and fancy logic, but deep down they're plotting your inferior demise.

Take this list as a warning then, here are the nine PlayStation AI's you need to keep a close eye on...

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The cake, and every sarcastic syllable uttered by the wonderfully sardonic GLaDOS, is a big fib. Though the AI would gladly test Chell with a variety of dimension-distorting puzzles until the end of time, she eventually becomes a reluctant ally in the sequel.

Never has the name Guardian Angel held so little meaning. Not only does this artificial overseer suck at watching out for the Vault hunters, she also regularly betrays them. In fairness, Angel does have a tragic past, as her pappy tethered her to a computer after she drove her mammy away.

EDI or (Enhanced Defence Intelligence) was once a dry-witted computer sphere. Though she lacked a body at the time, she still seemed to have a romantically-charged relationship with pilot Joker. Naturally, he’s thrilled when she commandeers a smokin’ body for herself in ME3.

The Thinker is either the centre of the Rapture Operational Data Interpreter Network or The Riddler’s dweeby second cousin. After creating said intelligence, its two inventors battled over its purpose, with one hoping to predict sports scores and the other trying to use it as a home for the personality of his dead wife. Creepy.

Don’t let that Zooey Deschanel fringe fool you. Eliza Cassan is pure evil. For much of HR, Cassan passes herself off as a reporter, but once Adam Jensen does some sleuthing, he discovers she’s the AI responsible for his wife’s kidnapping.

With a moniker like The Executioners, Star Ocean’s race of computerised menaces were never likely to be cuddly space bunnies. And being a complicated and twee JRPG, their origin story is longer than the Bible.

There’s nothing like a little apocalypse to spawn an artificial intelligence that soon enslaves thousands of people in a Matrix-like web of virtual deceit. The game’s über baddy is a half-man/half AI called Pyramid who creates a mighty structure that keeps its prisoners docile with happy memories.

Long thought to be nought but a group of harmless... alright, evil megalomaniacs, Metal Gear’s Patriots are revealed to be a group of super AI programmes. They were created by Big Boss’ arch enemy Major Zero in order to control the world’s digital flow of info. The cads.

President Eden is certainly the patriotic sort, being a rogue AI system who wants to murderise every last one of the Wasteland’s mutants – a task he’ll gladly wage war on the States in order to complete. USA! USA! USA!